Hacker News Reader

Comment by derbOac | Hacker News Reader

I went to a grant writing workshop sponsored by the university. When I got there the entire thing, and I mean entire thing, was about buttering up the grant review officers, how to network with people at the agencies, how to work your way into being their friends, and so forth.

Not a single thing about the writing process, or how to frame your ideas, or anything like that.

I know that's not how grants are always awarded, but as a junior faculty member it's hard to know what to make of that, when a university-sponsored workshop is structured around those issues.

It's difficult for me to wrap my head around this all most of the time, to convey to an outsider what bothers me so much about the whole thing, or to even articulate it to myself. I can make comparisons to certain things (Theranos, cryptocurrencies, or economic bubbles) but it's very abstract and fuzzy and imperfect. So much of it seems empty to me, or false.

View on HN

When I went to one of these things, it was pretty much entirely about how to scope the work and how to write the proposal. Eg, for a big ERC grant, you need to propose something big and exciting enough to be worth 2 million euros, but small enough that you and 3 students/postdocs can do it in five years, since that's what 2 million euros can pay for. But our grant office did make sure that most of the speakers were people who had actually applied for these grants in the last round.

One really key thing for me was to reach out to senior colleagues in the same area (definitely not just at the same university) to get multiple examples of what successful grant applications look like. There's a bunch of text in the grant call, but the panel are going to be senior in-area academics who may know what a good application looks like, but won't necessarily be able to articulate all the rules.

Everyone I know finds writing proposals hard. So much of writing papers is being careful about citing prior work and not over-claiming for your results, but for grant proposals we are basically forced to make big claims about things that we have not done. However, it's worth noting that no one on the panels or at the grant agencies see research proposals as binding promises to do certain work: they mostly all want you to follow the science and change course if you spot something better.

Not just Theranos, virtually all early stage investment sees warm introductions as more important than a perfectly structured deck

Part of it's perfectly rational: faced with two competently written but not directly comparable proposals, knowing that one of the proposers is less of a mystery than the other is additional information about their ability to deliver, and part of it's humans being humans.

Ironically I'd see much of crypto and other investment bubbles as the opposite cognitive bias (who cares about the gaps in our knowledge, this number is going up faster than that number?)

I think the last part of what you are saying is actually maybe closer to why the comparison seems apt to me. Trivial patents are another comparison. There's an Emperor has no clothes aspect of it to me, a focus on appearance of scientific prestige or rigor over actual substance. Ioannidis' "Why Most Scientific Findings are False" is maybe the best-known reference point, although I think that's maybe slightly different from, if related to, the underlying phenomena I have in mind.

HN maybe isn't the best forum to explain all of this but I'm quite jaded at this point with academics.

I don't want to come across as too negative either, as implying nothing works or there is no progress or something like that, but there's a huge disconnect between what I see personally in scientific circles in actuality vs the nominal narrative in terms of how ideas are taken up, how consensus is reached, what happens to accurate but dissenting perspectives, and how credit accrues. Some of it is common to our time, but some of it I think is amplified or something in the academic community.

I also realize at some level my experiences are not universal, but that there are a lot of people who feel the same (apparently) maybe just underscores my point.

When someone like Peter Higgs is saying he wouldn't be employable today (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...), scientific institutions should be paying closer attention and doing something about it.

In contrast, ours focused almost entirely on polishing and refining our specific aims page. Eight weeks on what was effectively perhaps two pages of writing. Draft after draft, peer review, etc.

Landed said grant on first submission.

This is impressive. Did others in the workshop have same experience as you of getting grant on first submission too? If so, the workshop can get credit, else you deserve the credit.

Candidly, my hit rate isn't high enough to assume it was me ;)

I didn't keep track of most of my cohort from that program, but the ones I have had been fairly successful. Mostly, I think the benefit was structured time and an available "red team" to read it (one contract research organization I've worked with had one of these, and it was an amazing experience) etc.

Those two messages are very different from my experience writing (and generally getting) grants in France. Grant reviewers are anonymous, how could you even butter them up ?

Not the reviewers, the agency officers overseeing the reviews and awards.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com